I have spent most of my life (so far) in and around a farm in one of the most remote and poor areas of Greece. Being surrounded by farmers and people working in the primary and basic construction sector, I had not appreciated the ingenuity and collaborative effort these people put in their day to day activities to achieve sustainability. It was not until I spent several years away from my family home that it dawned on me how uncritically immersed urbanised societies were in the technology they are handed.
I had always been enamoured with information and communication technologies. I was experimenting with free and open source software and tinkering with hardware to get my work done affordably and to have some control over the digital technologies I have been using. But I came to understand that open source is something beyond an efficient approach to hi-tech. It is a social movement.
Openness, sharing resources and other terms like these are used today to add a âsexinessâ factor to products or institutions that do not deserve the name. This has led to the term âopenwashingâ (borrowed from âgreenwashingâ) to call out this trend. Similarly, participatory or user-driven design, co-creation or co-construction and other concepts have been proposed to include the public or at least some diversity of stakeholders in the technology development. However, such initiatives, mostly externally driven, are often organised top-down and do not essentially involve citizens. Hence, the dichotomy is maintained between expert and layman ignoring the social complexities of stakeholder engagement.
This book explores those initiatives that have been self-mobilised from within farmer communities, in a bottom-up fashion, and are engaging in technology development for the community itself. The practical lessons learned from this research project are being applied in our efforts to provide the local community, where I grew up, with the tools to formulate an effective organisation similar to the ones I discuss here.
This book explores technology designed and produced by farmers to accommodate their particular needs. I trace the emergence of a new social movement that facilitates and promotes this type of technology. I thus discuss two case studies of social movement organisations and their technological communities: the Farm Hack network in the USÎ and the LâAtelier Paysan initiative in France. The focus is on how they frame their activities and how this translates in the alternative technology development model. I use the following conceptual tools: framing analysis and resource mobilisation theory from the social movement research field, and the constructivist approach and critical theory of technology from the technology research field.
This book illustrates how individuals refuse to embrace a technological system of mainstream agriculture that does not reflect their values and interests, and instead rely on alternative framings of technological culture to give meaning to their vision of how agriculture should be. By doing so, I address a novel collaborative mode of technology production, substantially different from the dominant market-driven one.
I employ the concept of the social movement to describe this collective activity, albeit in an early stage. This enables the tracing of the various ideological frames that contribute to the creation of a common set of principles and goals for those engaging in this activity as well as their efforts to gain support. That is why framing analysis has been selected as a key theoretical approach, combined with an investigation of the incentivising and resource management processes within the movement organisations.
I also examine the details of the production process in the broader sociotechnical environment. I argue that this emerging mode of production signals a break from the capitalist mode of technology production and formulates a more democratised alternative.
1.1 Technology and Conventional Agriculture
The shift from feudalism to capitalism and the start of the land enclosures along with colonialism marked the transformation of agricultural production. The capitalist system evolved alongside agricultural activity, influencing how production took place and, thus, marking a gradual shift from subsistence to commodity production (Brenner 1976; Albritton 1993). While peasants were transformed into labour workers to feed the industrial revolution, machinery and modernised farming techniques, which increased productivity and yields, were introduced to feed. All economic activity became driven by capital accumulation, labour exploitation and escalating competition (Wood 1998). This sparked the accumulation of land and great centralisation of production in large farms, where former peasants became waged labourers (Federici 2004). The capitalist production took not only land from peasants but also the soil itself, meaning the fertility of the land due to overproduction, initiating the need for modern farming methods (Marx 1999).
The competitive environment substantially transformed agriculture and enabled the rise of âagribusinessâ (Davis and Goldberg 1957). This term was introduced in 1957 to characterise the infiltration of the industrial sector in agriculture. Intensive industrial agriculture and proprietary technology captured more and more traditional practices from farmers, initially with mechanical inputs that favoured large-scale production (Gifford 1992) and later with chemical and biological ones (Lewontin 1998). This led to the cannibalisation of farms by competitors, who were more adept at the âtechnology treadmillâ (Cochrane 1993), and to the massive expansion of the agribusiness sector. The industries introduced large, complex and expensive motorised machinery that multiplied productivity. The treadmill was initiated and farms were forced to keep upgrading into new inputs to be able to compete (Mazoyer and Roudart 2006). The process of capturing expanded into new methods of farming with the introduction of chemical fertilisers, pesticides and growth hormones but also proprietary, genetically modified seeds, replacing free knowledge and techniques developed and tested by farmers over centuries.
Capitalist accumulation takes place through exclusionary intellectual property licenses and the creation of artificial scarcity. This is justified with the claim that intellectual property rights create incentives for economic agents to pursue the research and development of new products and services (Arrow 1962). Intellectual property in agriculture is manifested in all stages and dominates over farmer-developed options. For instance, patents for plants were issued and the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) was established. Traditional farmer varieties failed to meet the criteria for protection and over the years were replaced by proprietary ones. The advances in bioengineering in the 1990s spread intellectual property licences drastically (Lewontin 1998), enforcing restrictions not only in specific plants but also in certain traits, genes and even methods that were manufactured in labs (Aoki 2009).
The outcome of this enclosure process has been the tremendous agriculture-related technological concentration in the hands of a few mega-corporations. According to a report (2013) by the ECT (Erosion, Technology and Concentration) group, the worldâs top three companies control 53% of the global commercial seed market and the top ten control 76% (meaning the seeds that are sold which excludes seeds developed and exchanged by farmers). Moreover, six companies account for 76% of the global agrochemical market; ten pesticide firms hold about 95% of the global market; ten firms control 41% of the global fertiliser market; three companies account for 46% of the animal pharmaceuticals market and seven firms control 72%. Finally, four companies account for 97% of poultry genetics, and another four account for 66% of swine genetics. As far as mechanical inputs are concerned, concentration is continually rising with four companies controlling 50% of the global market by 2009 and eight companies controlling more than 60% (Fuglie et al. 2011). Meanwhile, by 2008 five companies held 90% of the global grain trade, three countries produced 70% of maize and the 30 largest food retailers accounted for 33% of world grocery sales (McMichael 2009).
The starting points for oppositional activities have been at least two. First, the notion that conventional agriculture presents severe challenges to small-scale farmers. Second, the technology model supporting it has removed the farmers from the creative process of developing artefacts supposed to accommodate their activity, largely ignoring their empirical input and desires.
Mumford (1964) claimed that there are two parallel sets of technology: one authoritarian and one democratic. The former is system-centred and powerful but also unstable. It is centralised, large-scale and with a high degree of specialisation that turns humans into resources. While this system has been around for centuries, it has infiltrated modern society to such a degree because it seemingly accepts the basic principle of democracy. Its products are equally available to anyone who can afford them. However, one can only take what the system offers. The latter set is human-centred, based in craft and agricultural communities whose activity is, while limited, adaptable and durable. This type of technology, characterised by creativity and autonomy, is developed to address specific social needs through appropriate means.
Such a distinction, simplistic and wide open to criticism as it may be, builds a framework to explore the potentialities of an alternative technological strand. I look into initiatives that formulate a new social movement; whose goal is to promote open source technology developed by its users in agriculture against the perceived authoritarian version of the agricultural system. I thus examine the political, economic, ethical and cultural stimuli behind their technological development as opposed to the economic-political agenda of the agribusiness sector.
1.2 Conceptualising Open Source Agriculture as a New Social Movement
I study initiatives that consist of small-scale and organic farmers, adherent designers and engineers, and activists, who oppose the socioeconomic and technological aspects of conventional agricultural production but also its other, more severe, consequences. For instance, its environmental impact due to the large-scale methods employed and the reliance on fossil fuel resources (Tilman 1999); the significant reduction of biodiversity (Biao et al. 2003); the great increase in energy requirements (La Rosa et al. 2008) and the depletion and contamination of water (Brown 2004). These open source initiatives are collaboratively designing and manufacturing their tools and machines to address their needs. Using modern information and communication technol...